If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Re: An Option Towards Developing Treatment-Free Bees

Jonathan,
Thanks for your real-world caveats and contributions. Yup, we've "bird-walked" way off-topic (I was trying to understand what point WLC was trying to make by deconstructing his gnostic comments). Good luck with the Amm breeding project.

Re: An Option Towards Developing Treatment-Free Bees

I think it does. It would be useful if you could tell me what doesn't make sense. Then we could do some learning.

Originally Posted by jonathan

We are largely in agreement about the limitations of wing morphometry.

This plot shows wing samples from one of my A.m.m. colonies compared with wings from a New Zealand carnica queen colony in Scotland which I scanned. The CI difference alone makes it very easy to separate the two.
Like I said, I have data from about 100 colonies I have scanned and I am much less confident about the utility of this technique than I used to be - when you are dealing with hybrids.

That seems to me to say: I spent a lot of time finding out something I could have found out by glancing sideways at the bees!

I can see the utility when, like Ruttner, there are only two sub-species in play and you have the capacity to create and hold an island of foreign bees within the larger pond. (In his case he was attempting to wipe out the home bees using a massive scale centrally planned multi-beekeeper operation)

Anyway, its been an interesting conversation and I've learned a lot - thanks.

Re: An Option Towards Developing Treatment-Free Bees

Originally Posted by JWChesnut

I haven't gone back to look at the fundamental papers establishing the wing morphometric discipline. I played around with wing scans (and posted these to a previous thread). I see two big issues with its implementation.

Having only scanned it I have a better idea of what is possible. Its not simple though is it?

I really can't yet see a use for tf beekeeping. Unless you believe a particular race is predisposed toward mite management (I don't think there are any grounds for such a belief) and on the basis that locally adapted bees are best, then you're going to be working with hybrids, and there's little point in trying to do anything else. Unless you live in an area where a native race remains. But then you're doing something else, not doing something that aids tf.

With that said, WLC's reasons (#107) are interesting, and I'd like to hear more. Maybe we could make them the starting point of a new thread - morphometry in the service of tf selection goals or somesuch.

I'd also like to hear what it is Jonathan finds objectionable in my housebrick analogy. I thought it worked rather well. We need to note that every brick is a certain shape/fits in a certain place to complete the picture.

Re: An Option Towards Developing Treatment-Free Bees

Originally Posted by WLC

TF beekeepers do need some way to examine hybridization issues or at least know where their bees 'fit in' with regards to other stock.

We do?

Humor me. Do you get on Beesource and reply to posts right there in your classroom in front of students, or do you step out of the room to the teachers lounge to reply? Curious how this happens when you're a teacher around students all day. Is Beesource part of the curriculum?

Re: An Option Towards Developing Treatment-Free Bees

But the design of a brick is uniformity. Any brick can fit the same place.

That's what I mean. We have to use the analogy maybe of a stone building, where each stone is different/and has a special position - a 3D jigsaw puzzle.

For our three subspecies, each of tens of thousands of special stones comes in 3 colours. (We're still simplifying, but this'll do to get on with.)

When we peek through our hole in the covers of our newly built houses, we're looking at the same shaped stone each time. It may be any of three different colours.

The question is what can the knowledge thus gained tell us about the rest of the house/bee?

Say its the right colour - blue. Does it tell us that the rest of the stones are blue? No.

Does it tell us how many might be blue? No.

Say its the wrong colour. Does it tell us how many of the other stones are the wrong colour? No.

It does tell us that its not a 100% pure blue house (and, if say the stone is yellow, that its also not a 100% red house)

It could be that all the other stones are the right colour, and its just that one that's wrong! (Very unlikely I know, but its still true.)

It is very likely that all the other stones are evenly distributed (in our case) between the 3 colours. And in that case the one with a blue stone (that we can see) is no more representative of its class than the rest.

Until you have an idea of the sorts of proportion of components held in any house, you can't evaluate significance of the presence of one particular stone. (We do have that knowledge here - they are evenly distributed from 3 sources)

You can get a picture of the proportions by making lots of holes (always in identical places) and combining the data statistically. Then, and only then, can you begin to evaluate matters - and then and only then can you assign a (statistical) significance to one particular stone.

So you have to do an extensive survey, then evaluate what any particular feature might signify, before you start attaching significances - in order to make choices.

And you have to realise that as soon as you start making choices on the basis of a particular feature, you start undermining the significance you can attach to later instances of that feature (from your population).

Its pretty tricky stuff. I'm guessing, but I don't suppose the salesmen tell you that while they're trying to earn a living.

Re: An Option Towards Developing Treatment-Free Bees

Originally Posted by WLC

In my opinion, the real value of using GWV in TF beekeeping is that it can give you information with regards to the degree of hybridization of your resistant stock.

If you start with a pure race queen which has mated with drones from the same subspecies that is probably true. If you start with a hybrid queen which has mated with a selection of say 15 random drones how are you going to ascertain the genetics of each of her 15 virgin queen daughters which are half sisters then take into account the different drones and different numbers of drones each will mate with. Good luck with that one. Maybe with access to a lab and a budget of several thousand dollars per colony!
The scattergram of the wing plots from a hybrid queen is likely to be all over the place rather than a nice tight cluster and then you are looking at virgin queen daughters from bees with these varied wing patterns which mate with a wide selection of random drones. You would have more accuracy reading tea leaves.

The problem here is bee genetics. If a queen mated with a single drone, the wing patterns would be more straightforward to interpret but that's not the case.

Take this example. Each dot represents a scan of a worker bee wing from a colony. Any of these could potentially have become a queen.col75.jpg

You have wings which range from a Discoidal shift of -6 and a low cubital index of 1.5 to those which have a Discoidal shift of +1 and a Cubital index of well over 2.0. Which one of these could become a daughter queen?
In terms of appearance, a colony like this can look very uniform, ie all dark with no yellow banding.
That is not even an extreme example as I don't have that much hybridisation in my bees. I have seen scattergrams where the wing plots appear to be randomly distributed over the entire plot area. As I said, good luck with the tea leaves.